Sep 24, 2013

(much of this information was sent in Arabic also to a large
list of key leaders)

President Barak Obama said in the middle of his 40
minutes of lies and hypocrisy at the UNGA as world leaders looked on in
dismay: “With respect to Syria, we believe that as a starting point, the
international community must enforce the ban on chemical weapons.” (The US and
Israel both possess and have used chemical weapons, see below) and
added “Although we will at times be accused of hypocrisy and inconsistency
[!], we will be engaged in the region for the long haul” [to serve Israel].
Incredibly he also said he believed in American
"exceptionalism" [white man's burden]. Hypocritically he also
mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. But MLK opposed American imperialism and
exceptionalism and who said in a speech in 1968: “God didn't call America
to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a
senseless, unjust war ….. We have committed more war crimes almost than any
nation in the world.”[we still do]

In my trip to Poland two weeks ago, I challenged Mr. Robert
Wexler, a life-long Israeli-apologist who was a US Congressman and now runs a
Zionist non-governmental organization. I also asked him “if indeed you
did not effectively work for AIPAC, why did you vote yes for every single AIPAC
bill in your 18 years in Congress including all the bills promoting US wars for
Israel?” He did not have an answer. Wexler is being groomed to be
the next Jewish Zionist who will take over as a “peace envoy” in the endless
peace process [industry]. Yet we learn that Mr. Abbas [term long expired,
disdained by Palestinians not employed by his authority] chose to elevate Mr.
Wexler by having him host a meeting with right-wing Jewish American
establishment figures to "reassure them." What did Mr. Abbas
tell the gathered pro-apartheid leaders? As documented by notes to reporters
handed out by Mr. Wexler’s outfit, Mr. Abbas:

- condemned the killing of two Israeli occupation/apartheid
soldiers who were enforcing occupation and apartheid

- said that he had agreed to resume negotiations by Israeli
conditions (suspension of going to UN agencies for basic human rights of the
Palestinians).

- he begged the audience and the Israeli government to work
to stop settlement "expansion" (previously he had said we will not go
back to negotiations without this). These colonies are actually a crime against
humanity per International law (see ruling of the International Court of
Justice).

- he said that six of his eight grandchildren attended
“seeds of peace” program with Israeli youth (an outfit normalizing occupation)

- he repeated his mantra that the 2000-2005 intifada was
“wrong”. This was latest of 14 uprisings against the brutal colonization of
Palestine ( international law supports resistance to occupation by all means).

- he stated that the US is the key to the “peace
process”[industry]. The US administration continues to give billions to
support Israeli apartheid and to have Mr. John Kerry lead this “process” (who
also voted in the Senate strongly for AIPAC bills). President Obama
focused his speech at the UN and his policies to protect his paymasters in Tel
Aviv by lie after lie.

Mr. Abbas DID NOT MEET with even one of the tens of
thousands of Jewish anti-Zionists in America. He did not even meet with
moderate Jewish organizations like “Jewish Voice for Peace” or any of the key
organizations that support human rights (like the US campaign against the
Occupation or Al-Awda).

I think every Arab with dignity must read the speeches of
global leaders at the United nations including the president of Brazil (who
devoted half her talk to chastise the US for its illegal spying) and the US
president who lied at just about every other sentence of his lengthy speech.

Even though we may disagree with some world leaders, we see
many who did not grovel and beg for their people’s rights from the United
States (of Israel!?). History will judge harshly those politicians who
lied and sold the people’s rights.

Final thought: I wish more world leaders talk about nuclear
and chemical stockpiles in Israel and the US. It is time to either
wrestle the UN out of the grip of the US or reform the USA so that it is no
longer dominated by the Israel lobby.

Must read articles

Israel's History Of Chemical Weapons Use By Dr. Elias Akleh

http://www.countercurrents.org/akleh170913.htm

Birth Defects And Cancer Rates At Devastating High In Basra
And Fallujah (VIDEO)

Analysis of the success and failure of so called “aid” to
the Palestinians: Palestinians are far worse off today than they were in 1993
using any economic or political criterion. According to the income-based
definition of poverty, 50% of Palestinians lived in poverty in 2009 and 2010,
38% in the West Bank and 70% in Gaza. The World Food Programme has found that
50% of Palestinian households suffer from food insecurity. Unemployment has
been stuck at around 30% since 2009, with 47% unemployed in Gaza in 2010 and
20% in the West Bank. http://al-shabaka.org/policy-brief/economic-issues/can-oslos-failed-aid-model-be-laid-rest

Sep 22, 2013

It is very hard sometimes to go on “having joyful participation
in the sorrows of this world” (The Buddhist motto that I try to keep as a
guiding principle) when we witness so much injustice, so much poverty, so many
deaths, and so much hypocrisy. The key word and the most difficult is
“participation”. How do we participate in a meaningful moral way in such
a world? How do we know if we are doing something to make a difference,
or we are unable to make a difference? “God grant me the courage to
change the things I can, patience for those I can’t change and wisdom to know
the difference.” How can we find this wisdom to know. We struggle
with these questions daily because we see so much destruction, death,
hypocrisy, and stupidity. Here are just seven examples from many that
occurred to us this week under occupation:

1. Two women (one handicapped) were murdered in the Israeli
occupied areas this week, one in Deir AlGhosn area (Tulkarem) and one in Yatta
(Hebron). This is called “honor killing” by some! Is there a more
horrible thing than to claim there is honor restored through murder. I think we
should all write to the Palestinian authority to demand accountability for the
murderers (they must be treated as any other premeditated murders).

2. The US and Israeli governments feverishly lobbied other
countries to narrowly defeat a non-binding resolution at the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that would have simply asked Israel to join the
International Atomic Weapons Treaty. I think each of us should write to their
governments that voted against or abstained to complain about this hypocrisy
and collusion with an apartheid dangerous nuclear state.

3. The Egyptian military joined the Israeli military as
Gaza's jailer making a desperate situation grow even more desperate. Sign
petition here and write also to your media and politicians to demand pressure
on the Egyptian military
rulers:https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Egypt_Open_Gazas_Rafah_Crossing_1/?twi
more info at:

4. The Israeli occupation forces manhandled EU diplomats and
seized humanitarian aid for Palestinians being ethnically cleansed from the
Jordan valley. You can write to politicians and media.

http://jahalin.org/?p=2308&preview=true

5. The World Health Organization Refuses to Publish Report
on Cancers and Birth Defects in Iraq Caused by Depleted Uranium Ammunition We
should write to them and complain.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-refuses-to-publish-report-on-cancers-and-birth-defects-in-iraq-caused-by-depleted-uranium-ammunition/5349556

6. Nearly seven million Palestinian refugees still await
implementing their internationally recognized right to return to their homes
and lands. Now we add two million Syrian refugees who are hosted by
bordering countries (except Israel who does not take such refugees because it
is a state for Jews). Saudi Arabia and other gulf states who fund US wars
and their own proxy wars on other countries (including Syria) must be
asked to pay poor countries like Jordan and Lebanon for the cost of hosting
these refugees.

7. Israel continues to profit from the occupation to the
tune of $10-12 billion/year. The boycott, divestmen, and sanctions movement is
spreading. You can help. As an example, some activists decided to
target Sodastreamwith a National Sodastream Day of Action - Saturday 28
September. Sodastream is a home carbonation device that is made in violation of
International Law in an illegal Israeli settlement on stolen Palestinian land.
The Geneva Conventions specifically prohibits this, and the International Court
of Justice has advised that Israel’s settlements in the occupied West
Bank are illegal. Sodastream is profiting from the theft of valuable
Palestinian water and land, and the exploitation of Palestinian labour.

www.palestinecampaign.org/events/sodastream-national-day-of-action/

To get involved please:

- Like and share the Facebook events page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/160954334090586/

The least you can do is be an arm-chair activist and use the
wonderful gift of the internet to send politicians and media letters and
inquiries. It does make a difference. Sometimes a short letter with
two sentences is enough. I find to be disciplined dedicating a set time
every week to do that even 20 minutes or half an hour a week) can make a big
difference. The biggest difference is in our own hearts (satisfying our
conscience that we were not just spectators).

I wrote before about “mental occupation” which is an illness
that is much more dangerous than physical occupation/colonization. But
the more I consider the subject the more I realize that to liberate people’s
minds we mush shed all chains that justify using culture, religion, and
societal norms to justify our lack of action. We must have an internal
revolution that liberates our minds. We must create a new human being.
I am not talking here about replacing a cultural and religious slavery
with a materialistic capitalist slavery. I am talking about real freedom
that starts with acting on our common morality. What is this common morality?
If you try to distill the earliest ideas of all religions into their
basic and common principles you find that the bottom line is “do no harm” or
equivalently the golden rule which is to treat others as you would like to be treated.
Do no harm means no stealing, no killing. no rape, no lying etc.
I know atheists and agnostics who lived all their lives with this common
morality so it is not even related to religion.

We “can’t be neutral on a moving train” (Howard Zinn) and we
must take actions based on this common morality or we join the hypocritical
silent masses that allow evil to do what it does. Each of us knows these
truths at some deeper level and each of us must choose how to have “joyful
PARTICIPATION in the sorrows of this world”.

Sep 16, 2013

I am back to Bethlehem which is physically under Israeli
occupation. But then again that is less significant than mental occupation from
which so many people in Palestine and elsewhere seem to suffer. Perhaps if more of us free their minds of
this mental occupation we can more easily rid ourselves of the physical
occupation and colonization whether here or in America or the rest of the
world. The following are just samples of
the symptoms of this Orwellian world.

-Israeli occupation forces demolish yet another Palestimoam
village and the Western goverments remain silent

It is very meaningful for me to be in Poland
for the first time. In 1989, you had the peak of your inspiring uprising in
Poland. We in Palestine also had an inspiring uprising that peaked in that period.Unlike your uprising, we did not succeed
then.We have had a total of 15
uprisings in the past 130 years. Gaza had several uprisings each reminiscent of
the Warsaw uprising.In Gaza 1.5 million
people, most of them refugees are forced to live on a small desert regions, now
one of the most densely populated areas on earth. In fact, we draw inspiration
from each other.

There is a joke about a reporter in Jerusalem
visiting the wailing wall and noticing an old Jewish man praying so he
interviewed him.What do you pray for at
the wall? I pray for world peace!How
long have you been praying for world peace at the wall? 27 years! And how does
it feel to be praying for 27 years at the wall for world peace? How do you
think if feels..it feels like praying to a freaking wall!!!

I said yesterday I am optimistic about the
future in our part of the world.I
actually wrote a book called sharing the land of Canaan looking to a shared
future, one democratic state for all its people in our homeland.I was talking to Dr. Geremek yesterday over
dinner and we both share medical background which makes us optimistic
always.For knowing the diagnosis is
important but giving therapy and giving patients some information on prognosis
is equally important.

Yet, we live in an age of universal deceit
where proper diagnosis is obfuscated by propaganda.This is the age in which truth telling, as
one author said, becomes a revolutionary act.Words seem to be switched on us in this Orwellian era. Two speakers
yesterday tried to use verbal acrobatics to justify the unjustifiable while proclaiming
that French and US governments are trying to promote human rights in the middle
east. One thing that brings to mind is the Orientalism discussed by my late
friend Edward Said. Western governments have been engaged in destructive
partnership with the most repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Israel. Just
imagine what would have been the reaction if the roles were reversed.What if Arabs and Muslims who were living in
their golden age joined party with the repressive kingdoms of Europe during the
Middle Ages! The best thing European and American governments can do is stop
being partners in crime with those who repress us and leave us alone.We would surely develop much faster.Certainly faster than what even we
expect.Surely the Berlin Wall tumpled
faster tahn we expected.Certainly Soviet
collapse also happened faster than we expected and also the end of apartheid in
South Africa.

We have to remember that France, England and
Russia joined forces to divide the Middle East in the Sykes-Picot
agreement.It was France that issued the
Jules Cambon declaration in 1917 just before England issued the Balfour declaration
in support of the racist Zionist idea which was to give our country to the
Zionist movement. And it is the US and
the Soviet Union that almost simultaneously recognized the theft of Palestine
to create a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world. America, far from
being a promoter of human rights used nuclear bombs on civilians and used Napalm
and Agent Orange in Vietnam.They then
played their chess game at our expense. People do not forget things like the
CIA’s toppling of the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 to
install the brutal Shah!

Martin Luther King who opposed American
imperialism and exceptionalism gave his last speech in 1968 stating:

God
didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call
America to engage in a senseless, unjust war ….. We have committed more war
crimes almost than any nation in the world.

King went on to talk about peace and economic
justice saying:

What I'm
saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that life is individual.
Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found
neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a
higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of
both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to
see that the problems of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the
problem of war are all tied together.

Israel provides the most blatant case of
double standards and the achille’s heel of empire that tries to cover its
nakedness by empty talk about human rights, democracy, and international law
while everywhere the same people mouthing those directly support war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and the antithesis of democracy.

The largest remaining post-WWII refugee crisis
is the Palestinian refugees.We have 7
million refugees or displaced people coming from 530 ethnically cleansed
villages and towns.Israel still refuses
to allow us to return to our homes and lands.Why does the West tolerate this and continue to support Israel

Israel has over 50 laws that make it an
apartheid racist state that discriminates against non-Jews.And even though both US law and European law
says that countries that persistently violate human rights should not be
supported, yet Europe follows US policy of blind obedience to the short-sighted
Israel lobby. One wonders why every neighboring country to Syria except Israel
each received at least half a million Syrian refugees?There is so much that is not being discussed
in discussing the Arab revolts including the negative role that global and
regional powers play. We have to remember who pushed for US war on Iraq and who
is now pushing for the US war on Syria and Iran.

I am optimistic because I travel a lot (just
in the past few months to Jordan and its Syrian refugee camps, to Egypt,
Turkey, India, South Africa, and Japan) and see a growth of the same kind of
global movement that helped end apartheid in South Africa trying to end Israeli
apartheid. I am optimistic because wars no longer achieve their intended goals
of promotion of imperialism and racism.Good examples of this in the past 10 years are the US war on Iraq and
Israel’s war on Lebanon and Gaza.I am
optimistic despite the stupidity of both the Hamas leaders in Gaza and the
Fatah leaders in Ramallah; both focused on their narrow personal interests than
they are the interest of millions of Palestinians.

So I have the same dream as Martin Luther King.
Getting past the European 19th century ideas of ethnocentric nation states
towards a a socjety in which citizens share and live in equality and with
respect to human rights.A society in
which war is a thing of the past, where justice rolls like a mighty stream,
where each person is valued regardless of his/her skin color or religion. This
is the dream of our world and it is a dream that is worth for us to sacrifice
and struggle for.

Sep 6, 2013

There will be a demonstration in Ramallah tomorrow
(Saturday) at noon (Manara square) against the ongoing Oslo capitulations

On Thursday we visited a 16 year old young man (Udai Sirhan)
who had his skull chattered months ago by an Israeli bullet in Bethlehem and he
is still hospitalized after three operations (photos at http://3abalata.blogspot.com/2013/09/blog-post.html). The bullet is still in his brain. We also visited a friend from Al-Walaja (Basel
AlAraj) who was beaten by “Palestinian Authority” security services trained by
the US when he and other young people tried to demonstrate holding four mock
coffins for four Palestinians killed earlier that week (3 killed by Israeli
forces, one by Palestinian forces). Video
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2JkN9tdo-M

Basel and I were twice arrested together by Israeli forces
in Al-Walaja. He is a most decent, kind and gentle human being. He and others like him are being targeted by
the Palestinain authority which continues to cooperate and coordinate with the
occupation forces. This is painful. Sometimes we feel pain that is at a far
deeper level than any physical pain. It
is visits like these that makes us lose sleep. We wish the world to wake-up to the
continuing injustice inflicted on the people and landscape of Palestine with
the collusion and support of many Westerners but also many Arab leaders and
even some Palestinians.

Secretary of State John Kerry referenced a photograph run by
BBC purporting to be of a Syrian massacre when it was from Iraq 2003. See BBC
mistakenly runs dated Iraq photo to illustrate the syrian massacre

and the New York times finally published an article about
the brutalities/atrocities committed by the US-backed “rebels” (most are
mercenaries from other countries financed by Saudi Arabia and trained in
neighboring countries to Syria)

The US government daily commits crimes against humanity
around the world either directly or indirectly through regimes the US supports
(like Israel and the Saud royal family).
Yet, they try to lecture the world about “human rights”. That so many people fall for it is pathetic
but that some Palestinains also do is really painful. Pain is something we expect under Israeli
occupation but increasinglyour pain cmes from knowledge of horrors of
collusion/collaboration/complicity with crimes against humanity.

About Me

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem University (BU) and directs the BU's cytogenetics laboratory and the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability in occupied Palestine. He also taught at Birzeit and Al-Quds Universities. He is author of "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle", “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment”, "Mammals of the Holy Land", and "The Bats of Egypt." He formerly served on the board of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People in Beit Sahour and Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Society at Aida Refugee Camp.